Padmini RM
@padmini.bsky.social
founder @ designbeku.org. ♥️: design and data justice, embroidery, tango and cats. 🤬: "design thinking", "innovation," #AIhype & patriarchy. ➕ ESRC Digital Good Fellow.
New Post: Why I Love AI Next month it'll be twenty years since I went to university, learned to program, and studied AI. I wrote about why I loved it, why I still love it, and why, unfortunately, it no longer exists. www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/i...
As an erstwhile book historian and current digital humanist I need the Bluesky community to help me solve a mystery: we've all read the spine chilling (pun intended) reports of anthropic and others chopping up books to scan, but I have some questions:
Reading this I've just realised what AI hype discourse reminds me of: a proud indulgent parent whose precious offspring can do no wrong; the tone in almost all reportage is breathless gushing, and never "yeah, so what?"
Showing your workings is a profoundly feminist act. youtube.com/shorts/R9VQn...
AI does the math
YouTube video by Oxford Mathematics
youtube.com
Martin Paul Eve@mpe.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 2mo ago"The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing...: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve" https://mathandai.org/
As the hype cycle around recent declarations around the eschatonic potential of AI escalate, I want to bring people's attn: to this doc by one of the so-called "fathers" of AI, John McCarthy: www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/slides/d... That first sentence sums up almost everything abt these narratives.
dartmouth-sli
dartmouth-sli
www-formal.stanford.edu
Bellingcat has been monitoring student protests in India. Police initially denied reports protesters were met with violence at a July 20 march, although later acknowledged injuries to protesters and officers. Social media videos showed tear gas deployed and batons used by police against protestors.
Police activate internet jammers at protest sites in India - just wait until I.C.E. finds out ! They will want to buy some ! timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/c...
CJP Protest Live Updates: Tear gas shells, stones fly as fresh clashes erupt between protesters and police near Jantar Mantar; 5 cops injured, internet services suspended - The Times of India
CJP Protest Live Updates: A fresh round of violence erupted at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Wednesday as protesters and police clashed amid the ongoing
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Scenes from US solidarity actions with the Gen Z protests in India
Now with Photo & Video: New York, San Jose, London, and Dublin Hold Protests In Support of India's Students — Hindus for Human Rights
HfHR joins demonstrations around the world in solidarity with students demanding fair examinations, institutional accountability, and the right to protest safely FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New York, NY;...
hindusforhumanrights.org
India: Protests continue as ‘cockroach’ party presents challenge for Modi government www.channel4.com/news/india-p...
India: Protests continue as ‘cockroach’ party presents challenge for Modi government
It began as an online joke, but now young Indians calling themselves 'cockroaches' are presenting a serious challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.
channel4.com
Millions of people in China have lost access to their AI partners after the government moved to impose harsh rules on emotional relationships between humans and machines ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...
China bans AI relationships with humans
Users lose digital partners as Beijing tackles declining birthrates.
ia.acs.org.au
What's with the tumbleweed here #indiasky?
Scroll@scroll.in · 4mo ago"Be it one year or two years, we will not give up. We will continue our protest till our demands are met." Protesters returned to Jantar Mantar, a day after the police used force to disperse the crowd across central Delhi. Kritika Pant reports
Just finished reading @randomwalker.bsky.social 's brilliant & sensible talk (here: www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...) where he talks about human creativity as evidence of superintelligence that can be possibly enhanced by AI, but poorly emulated by it.
What will be left for us to work on?
ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.
cs.princeton.edu
If you're trying to understand how some of the major players (people & companies) fit together in what is unfolding in tech & politics right now, this is a really useful resource from FES Future of Work. #EduSky #AIEthics #TechEthics #DataPrivacy #Politics #TechPolitics www.authoritarian-stack.info
The Authoritarian Stack
How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next
authoritarian-stack.info
Libraries and Librarians are so awesome.
Tim Ellis, TDSB Ward 2 Trustee 🍁@djdynamic.ca · 4mo ago"They just want to turn it off." A fascinating story of the librarians who have started teaching classes showing people how to remove AI "features" from their phones and apps. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/02/m...
I'm re-re-posting this significant article: "The open-source archive now contains more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and might otherwise have been lost forever."
How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased
Distributed backups, cyber resilience, and a half-million records are preserving Palestinian history beyond any single building or border.
wired.com
Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia – Episode 1 – 2 A beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking double premiere about the horror and tragedy of war and invasion… and one girl’s grasp for her own agency in the middle of it all. www.animefeminist.com/jaadugar-a-w...
Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia – Episode 1 - 2 - Anime Feminist
A beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking double premiere about the horror and tragedy of war and invasion... and one girl's grasp for her own agency in the middle of it all.
animefeminist.com
I'm putting together a database of indigenous initiatives that have been using AI for different use cases here: chivalrous-carpet-76a.notion.site/47e033ca4c5a... please do let me know if you have recommendations for initiatives for inclusion!
Indigenous Initiatives Using AI | Notion
This is a database of indigenous initiatives using AI for their own communities: please drop me a note at padmini@designbeku.org if you have suggestions for resources to be included, comments or amend...
chivalrous-carpet-76a.notion.site
Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, has long been out of print - used copies sell for hundreds of dollars. It's wild that this is not more widely available given how much his ideas still apply to the world we're in now. 🧵/
I'm currently working on the idea of untranslatability in the age of AI: looking at machine translation as an act of violence - and I'd love to hear about any models that cluster related concepts from different languages together. Already working on a prototype w/ a friend but tell me more!
This is big, and it took the global publicity that was warranted by the BBC to get them to *finally* take cognisance of Meta's continuous flagrant disregard for community guidelines and takedown requests.
Raman Media Network RMN@rmn-india.bsky.social · 4mo ago🚨 URGENT: India Summons Meta Executives! 🇮🇳 Case: Paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material.🛡️😱 #Meta #Instagram #OnlineSafety #ChildProtection #India #TechEthics #DigitalCrisis #RMNDigital #OpenWeb RMN Digital: www.rmndigital.com/india-summon...
Hello! I’m in the UK from the 23rd of April to the 22nd of May. I'll be in Cambridge / Edinburgh / London / Birmingham and Bristol and I’d love to be connected to folk who are interested in/working on:
The enshittification guy not just embracing enshittification tech, but defending it through strawman arguments that seek to misdirect his readers is quite the move. Yes, I’m talking about Cory Doctorow (very poorly) defending his use of LLMs, as @tante.cc expertly breaks down here:
Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...
tante.cc
Genuine question: does the #digitalhumanities need gen AI? Or is our work to imagine alternatives (psst, that's what I'm trying to do but I'm open to other ideas)
#digitalhumanities folk: could you please recommend significant work on topic modeling and small language models that you might have come across?
I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b... @apache.be you rule 🖤
Belgian AI scientists resist the use of AI in academia
Several AI scientists have published an open letter calling for a ban on AI use by students.
apache.be
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · last yr.> Among the signatories is Luc Steels, "the father of AI in Belgium." And he's not the only Belgian scientist supporting the resistance to "so-called 'AI' technologies." Apache spoke with Steels and co. "Universities encouraging students to use ChatGPT? I'm stunned" apache.be/2025/10/23/a...
enshittification intensifies. google now throwing up wrong timezone difference information. what is additionally bizarre is that it links to the correct result in from the linked snippet (worldtimebuddy.com)
